RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Fourth Fragment

* This is a fictionalized account of some shit that actually happened. All the names, locations, etc. have been changed to protect the innocent. – JG *

Perhaps this can be considered my attempt to kill the victims all over again, but this time in a way that makes sense. To give Katie a murderer who could be caught, who could confess, who could tell us what happened that night, who could pinpoint the moment when he could see in Katie's eyes that she realized that everything wasn't going to be OK, that getting caught by her parents or the police was nothing to fear, that here was fear, was Death.

And Jeremy Janks would still murder his brother, his mother, his father - but would've composed some manifesto, some quasi-political treatise to explain it all after they found his body along with the others. Because if this is to make sense, if this part of the story can make any sense, Jeremy Janks has to die. This is reasonable. This is an end. This is not some doughy-faced psychopath with nothing to say. This is multiple murder/suicide with an accompanying libretto. This is the drama we make of the real.

But Will Haynes does not die. That never made any sense to me. Even by the ludicrous standards of Kenton in the 1980s, it doesn't make any sense. A collateral car-crash victim? It is a stupid and useless death, it has no manageable dramatic effect and it has got to go. Maybe it happened in real life but not here, not now. Here things happen for reasons; here things make sense. Will Haynes is 51, divorced, lives in the Town of Towaphna with his girlfriend Cindy, 48, also divorced. She's a nurse; he works at Cole Muffler. They see their kids on the weekends.

But what of Kenneth, Gene, Carolyn, and Hugh? All still suicide, of course, but now with reason, explained reason, notes, connections between. A common cause. A cause that connects the 4 suicides to the murders of Mike Janks, Marge Janks, John Janks and Katie Hoehner. A cause that lives in Kenton, NY, in the dark, in the only evil place that ever existed in Kenton. In Snakeland.